New Working Group Launch: “The Art of Dying” at the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality
Ana Mendieta Alma. Silueta en fuego, 1975.
As part of the 2024–2025 offerings from the Program for the Evolution of Spirituality, I’ll be facilitating a new working group titled The Art of Dying: Artistic and Cultural Hermeneutics of Mortality and Transformation.
Meeting the first Monday of each month at 7:30 PM ET, this group invites participants to explore the aesthetic, spiritual, and political dimensions of death and dying. From Memento Mori to ego death, near-death experiences to apocalyptic narratives, we’ll examine how mortality is imagined, ritualized, and mediated across cultural and artistic contexts. Topics will include death as spectacle, death as metaphor, and death as a catalyst for personal and collective transformation.
All are welcome to participate. Open to students, scholars, artists, practitioners, and those working at the edges of spiritual inquiry.
This group provides space for interdisciplinary dialogue across theology, art, critical theory, and ritual studies, engaging frameworks from necropolitics and thanatology. Participants are encouraged to bring their own research, practice, or inquiry to the table. The group is part of a wider cohort contributing to the 2025 Spirituality and the Arts conference, held annually at Harvard Divinity School.
